Cos there's more to life than Ye Ye Girls, but not much more…

October 16, 2008October 26, 2012

Forgive me Caleb – How I learnt to love The Kings of Leon (and Oasis and Bob Dylan)

Everybody loves Kings of Leon and for the past couple of years I have been seriously in the dark. I went to Benicassim and all I heard was how good they were gonna be and it just went over my head. Then at Glastonbury I just skipped them as they never excited me.

Boy oh boy oh boy how wrong was I? The new album just grabbed me straight on in from the kick off track “Closer”. I tentatively downloaded it last week and was mesmerised. It’s simple yet powerful and has a heck of a lot of groove. With echoes of Soundgarden and of course the ubiquitous (for me at least) Led Zepp.

Anyways, it got me thinking. How many other bands did I get into late?
You know you grew up hating a certain artist or act and then low and behold you are met with one of their songs revelation style and it all seems to make sense.

Here’s another two I missed:

Oasis

After being a fierce Blur fan since about the age of 13 (it was the whole north/south divide thing) my turning point came at an Oasis gig in 2002 in Finsbury Park. My ex was a huge fan and I got tickets to cheer him up after a nasty scooter injury. I was kocked over by the power Oasis held over the crowd. All rock n roll swagger and leering vocals. I felt like I was watching the Stones at Altamont –anything could happen, I was on the edge of a major “happening”. Plus for once I was forced to just listen to them and realise just how many awesome anthems they had written. Yeah and then I saw Damon Albarn on that Britpop documentary and realised what a twat he was so that cleared that one up pretty swiftly.

Bob Dylan

Being a huge sixties love child and regularly bleating on about how much I wished I’d been born in 1945 instead of 1980 it was obvious I’d come to the Dylan question. After getting sick to the back teeth of hearing Highway 61 Revisited this and Dylan the genius that it was my Dad who finally brought me round.

It was simple really a young girl asks:

“Dad, what was the most exciting thing that happened to you in the sixties?” and he just said.

“Bob Dylan, when I heard the lyrics ‘Come mothers and fathers throughout the land and don’t criticize what you can’t understand. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command our old road is rapidly agin’. Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand for the times they are a-changin” I knew that was someone who understood what I felt and that the world would never be the same again”